Food for thought

While many countries are contemplating spending coal trucks of cash on renewable technologies, on carbon capture and storage, and on IFR nuclear technology, a small Norwegian start-up has cracked the bio-electrical secrets used by electric eels to generate their spark and managed to transform a crackpot idea into a possible planet saviour.

The system will deliver virtually free energy to anybody with the fitness to pedal hard a couple of hours a day - perhaps just an hour if they forego a big plasma screen.

The system is simple. Rise every morning and hop on a stationary bicycle connected to a cable and pulley system which raises an ultra high-density polymer cube up a column. As the block gravitates slowly down the column, it drives the patent-pending eel-ectric generator which powers the various electrical components in your house.

So . . . how does it work? How much does it cost? When will it be here? These, of course, are commercial-in-confidence details. But here are some hints for those of you bought up on Shakespeare instead of Newton. Your average moderately fit bronzed Aussie can output about 100-150 watts on a bicycle for maybe 30 minutes.

The garcons of the Tour de France eat 8-10,000 calories and train for five hours a day. This, plus lucky genes, is the secret behind their ability to output 300-400 watts for a few hours or so. To power an average house for a day you need to output about 1000 watts for between 10 and 30 hours depending on your frugality or lack thereof.

You can indeed rig a system to convert the energy from your legs into gravitational potential energy, but you can't get more out than you put in. So the eels were really just red herrings and even Lance Armstrong would have trouble keeping a big mother plasma screen powered up long enough to watch a whole episode of the Simpsons.

The take home lesson is that brilliant plans to save the world need to be quantified before being celebrated.

Were you fooled? Just a tad?

Engineers call such problems "scaling" failures. Human history is full of scaling failures, starting with the gatherer-hunter lifestyle. Gathering fruits, nuts, tubers and killing the occasional slow and shortsighted mammoth can indeed be sustainable for a tiny population in a huge land area. But it simply doesn't scale.

If the population grows beyond a certain size, it quickly depletes its food source and crashes. Always has, always will. More than a few lions will pretty soon crash the zebras. There is no romantic natural balance, it's just a roller-coaster boom and bust.

Some may call it intelligent design, other see it as proof that evolution is undirected, brainless and doesn't give a damn about either suffering or balance. Traditional Australian Aboriginal society, like other gatherer-hunters around the world, had all manner of ingenious forms of birth control - long breast-feeding periods, contraceptive

and abortion medicines, to name a few.

Why? Because even a few hundred thousand people living as gatherer-hunters could, from time to time and place to place, strain the carrying capacity of a continent of 770 million hectares which, with modern crops and animals, feeds 21 million and exports even more food than it consumes.

"Bush tucker", as it is called in Australia, is the bicycle and generator entrant in the food supply stakes. But meat eating of any description presents scaling problems. Grazing soon exhausts available land, and expands only by replacing wildlife through deforestation, and when you run out of cheap forest, you start feeding animals on grains.

In 2006/7 the world's livestock ate 700 million tonnes of grain leaving just 1000 million tonnes for people. Increasing meat production with grain feeding is inevitable. Just 8 per cent of the world's meat is produced by pure grazing.

It's tough to measure the degree to which livestock has displaced wildlife, but here's one killer statistic. Animals produce ammonia in their excretions and scientists have calculated that the ratio of livestock ammonia to wildlife ammonia is about 23 to 3. The grazing industries are currently chewing up and spitting out the planet's remaining tropical forests - with about 70 per cent of previously forested Amazon jungle now producing beef.

With continued population growth of course, all diets undergo scaling failures, even plant based diets. But the hierarchy of failure is simple: hunting, gathering, grazing, industrial meat production, cropping.

Fishing is really just hunting, which is why we are only getting 1 per cent of global calories from fish, but still decimating the oceans.

This isn't rocket science. There is a reason why a terrestrial food chain is often drawn as a pyramid. It has a small population of carnivores eating a larger population of herbivores eating an even larger population of plants.

It simply doesn't work the other way round. With 21 million Australians, we have an upside down food pyramid.

Currently, in addition to the 1.5 billion people in the developed world, a significant number of people in the developing world have developed a hankering for eating at the top of the food chain. This has lead to the developing world having just over a billion of the world's 1.3 billion cattle and two thirds of the planet's pigs [Andy Thorpe. Enteric fermentation and ruminant eructation: the role (and control?) of methane in the climate change debate. Climatic Change, 2008].

This enables the developing world's elite to eat like the planet's elite. This gives them the same diseases and requires the same diversion of scarce national funds to provide the same heart bypass and bowel cancer procedures as the developed world. Yes, Virginia, you can get a first rate triple bypass in Egypt, Brazil, China or Argentina.

Livestock now compete for food with the world's poor in a global market and win. Australia now feeds 12 million tonnes of grain to livestock annually rather than export t to the world's poor. Globally, livestock consume 700 million tonnes.

But who did we blame when the global grain crisis produced food riots in 40 countries? We blamed biofuels - despite their consumption of just 100 million tonnes.

Increasingly, the wealthy can limit the news they see to the news they want. Do the world's poor interfere with your enjoyment of your cable sports channel? Do they force their attentions into your movie channel or your favourite web sites? No, we can easily insulate ourselves from the unpalatable.

But the confluence of global warming, declining gas and oil supplies and water shortages will increasingly see food shortages shattering the complacency everywhere.

The last two years have produced extraordinary heatwaves in Australia. Scientists have calculated that, in a stable climate, the Adelaide consecutive heatwaves of 2008 and 2009 would have been a 1 in 1,200,000 year event.

But the climate isn't stable, it is changing. So expect longer runs of hotter days. Expect huge fields of food crops to wither in 50 degree heat producing not just higher prices but empty shelves.

Expect bigger firebreaks to be jumped by turbocharged fires fueled by hotter winds. Expect even Wilson Tuckey to notice that some parts of his anatomy are ablaze.

We need to stop ignoring the obvious and we need to pay attention. We need to pay attention to IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri's call for people to eat lower on the food chain because meat production accelerates global warming by driving deforestation and producing amounts of methane which, in Australia, produce more warming than all our coal fired power stations.

We need to eat lower on the food chain so that our livestock don't eat better than the world's poor. The bottom line is that the great Aussie BBQ needs a vegan facelift.